John Gray's apocalypse

A sceptic, a wit, and a very English thinker; is John Gray also the best theorist about our troubled world today?

In 1994, John Gray, then professor of politics at Oxford, published an essay entitled The Undoing of Conservatism. It made my hair stand on end. It was, in places, exactly what I had been writing. I rang him.

"Professor Gray..." "Oh, hello. Good to hear from you." Odd: somehow I wasn't expecting a Geordie accent. "What you have written seems perilously close to what I have written." "Synchronicity. Let's have dinner."

And so, for the next 13 years, I was to be entertained and dazzled by one of the most brilliant - and funny - men I have ever met. Gray doesn't present himself as funny, and is never reported as such, but he is very funny indeed. In conversation, he veers off into fantasies, usually about people whose world-view has collapsed. In the 1980s, he advanced the destruction of academic Marxism by publishing a review of a book entitled The Word